Texas used to have a simple rule:

Mind your own damn business.

We were never perfect at it. Hell, everybody knew everybody else’s business. But knowing somebody’s business and believing you had the right to run their life were two different things.

Somewhere along the way, that changed.

Now we have HOAs, Ring cameras, neighborhood Facebook groups, school-board wars, luxury “ranch” subdivisions, political grievance, lifestyle branding, surveillance everywhere, and a whole new class of people who seem to believe that every personal irritation is a public emergency.

That is the world behind Redneck Karens: How Texas Learned to Mind Everybody Else’s Business .

The manuscript is already written. This is not a campaign to someday write a book if enough people believe in me. The book exists. It is roughly 41,000 words of profane, funny, angry, personal Texas cultural criticism about what happened when the old mythology of independence, privacy, ranch life, small towns, San Antonio, the Hill Country, hunting culture, church culture, school politics, social media, suburban growth, and modern grievance all crashed into each other.

The “Redneck Karen” in this book is not one race, one sex, one political party, or one type of Texan.

It is a behavior.

It is the person who wants maximum freedom for themselves and maximum rules for everybody else.

The person who says “leave me alone” and then calls the county about the neighbor.

The person who moves to the country and complains about cows.

The person who buys five acres, calls it a ranch, and immediately joins the HOA board.

The person who has six security cameras and still thinks everybody else is suspicious.

The person who thinks every disagreement requires a manager, a school board, a sheriff, a committee, or a Facebook post.

This book is funny, but underneath the jokes there is a serious question:

What happened to the idea that sometimes the best response to somebody else’s weird behavior is simply, “Well, that’s their shit”?

I was born in San Antonio and raised in Floresville, Texas, and this book comes out of that world. South Texas. Ranch roads. Church parking lots. Hunting camps. Feed stores. Small towns. The Hill Country. San Antonio. Old families. New subdivisions. People who knew how to gossip without believing gossip gave them jurisdiction.

The book is not trying to pretend the old Texas was perfect.

It wasn’t.

There was racism, hypocrisy, cruelty, poverty, domestic violence people ignored, gay people treated badly, women expected to put up with too much, mental illness swept under the rug, and plenty of old-fashioned stupidity.

But mixed in with all of that were also some useful habits that seem to be disappearing:

Restraint.

Privacy.

Humility.

Neighborliness.

The ability to disagree without turning somebody into an enemy.

And the great lost Texas philosophy:

“Aw, f- it. Let him be.”

That is what Redneck Karens is really about.

This crowdfunding campaign is being launched through Route Three Productions and Route Three Publishing House so we can publish the book completely independently.

The goal is not to upload a cheap PDF and call it done.

The goal is to produce a real book.

Funds from this campaign will go toward professional editing and proofreading, cover and interior design, ISBNs and publishing setup, legal and pre-publication review, printing the first physical copies, audiobook production, shipping materials, and the costs involved in getting the book into readers’ hands.

I am also planning to produce an audiobook version read by me, Matt Pierce, in the same raw, conversational South Texas voice the book was written in.

Supporters will be able to choose from rewards such as digital editions, the audiobook, signed paperbacks, signed and numbered Founding Edition copies, and supporter acknowledgements.

The first physical run will be special.

This is the first title from Route Three Publishing House, and the people who back this campaign are not just buying a book after the fact.

You are helping launch the press.

You are helping pay for the first professional edition.

You are helping turn a finished manuscript into a physical book, an audiobook, and a real independent publishing project.

That matters.

Because independent publishing only works when readers decide something is worth helping bring into the world before a giant company tells them whether it is marketable.

If you back this project, you become part of the first group that made it possible.

You help us keep control of the book, keep the voice intact, keep the profanity intact, keep the weird Texas details intact, and publish it without sanding everything down into something safer and more generic.

That is the point.

This book should not sound like it came out of a corporate conference room.

It should sound like somebody sitting behind a microphone late at night somewhere in South Texas saying:

“What the hell happened to minding your own damn business?”

If that sounds like a book you want to exist, we would be proud to have you along for the ride.

Help me print it.

Help me record it.

Help me launch Route Three Publishing House.

And if Karen doesn’t like it?

She knows where the complaint form is.